Does art awaken the soul? Sounds a bit grandiose, but last night on the ‘news hour’ a pair of artists who had put up a video display in a thousand year old cathedral, said that was their business. On huge screens pixelated luminescent waterfalls, clouds and such collide, and here’s a lone individual wandering through an untrammeled landscape, probably a stand-in for us, I’m guessing. Thinking about art in such grand terms is beyond me, just a simple freelance image technician, a latter-day knight-errant with a license for windmills.
My concern is only about what people see, a much more basic approach. I assert that art modifies and recalibrates a person’s sense of sight, thereby altering and enriching every inch of their reality, only that. Please consider what percentage of visual information is registered in the brain from the total bandwidth coming back the optic nerve, a near-impossibility to observe directly. Each of us goes around believing what we see is reality, but are constantly being reminded others don’t see much of anything the same, and instead of assuming they’re all wrong, it might be more productive to take a more flexible approach.
If different people actually ‘see’ the world differently, it must mean sight, itself, is mutable, open to influence and to some extent, subject to the will. Spiritual concerns aside, as a sheer practical matter, is the individual able to see a wider world with broader experience, and all who have traveled say yes. Any who have waited tables see restaurants from a different angle, and an athlete’s experience of their game is quite apart from that of their fans. In our busy and sometimes narrow lives, wouldn’t it be handy to have a pill, some concentration of attention and thoughtful observation, a time-release mood-enhancing antidote to the funneling daily digital hash that drenches our brain?
Art up on the wall is the herbal remedy, a beacon of wider perspective and a retainer for the attention span, but it’s going to be up to the individual to self-medicate. Quacks of all stripes abound, proffering the plumped resume and the scent of ascendency, but a bleeding from your checkbook is their most predictable procedure, and one can expect a self-conscious ownership to ensue. There are different potencies, of course, but labels are notoriously unreliable, and the serious patient will have to use their own eyes, on their way to getting better already. Can art reorder the universe, well, it has been used that way in the past. The art still exists and we can see it at the museum, but today’s broad array of information sources leaves us free, theoretically, to live in pretty much in the world we choose.
Why would you, why would anyone, spend serious money on art? You bought a piece of art because you think you can sell it for a lot more in a few years, but better to go to the races instead, so much quicker. You’ve picked a soon-to-be famous name because you think it will impress your in-laws, the boss, the help, anyone, but sorry, they’ll laugh behind your back. You say you bought original art just to occupy the wall and complete the decor, extravagant, but at least direct and honest. A better reason to pay serious money, whatever that means to you, is because owning this piece of art will have a tangible affect on the way your world is seen, future decisions you’ll make and the life you’ll lead, just by having it around. Can art awaken your soul, maybe, I just don’t know, but it’s easily verified that visual art refreshes the sight, adding complexity and charm that were missing before, not so bad.
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